What is SatNOGS in non technical words: imagine a cheap mobile openhardware ground station that can collaborate through the internet with other ground stations and gather satellite signals all together, participating in a holistic opensource/opendata and public accessible database/site !

If you are thinking, that cant be right, the answer is that it is!!!

The amazing team behind the SatNOGS is working around the clock - non stop ONLY with openhardware and free software to do exactly that !

A fully modular system (you can choose your own antennas! or base setup) you can review the entire code on github, you can see in high quality videos and guides for every step, every process, you can participate via comments, emails or even satellite signals !

3D Printing is one of the major component in their journey till now. The have already published every design they are using for the satnogs project on github! You just need to print them. Every non-3d printing hardware are available to every hardware store near by you. The members of this project have published the Arduino code and schematics for the electronics too !!

Everything is fully documented in details, everything is open source !

AMAZING!

It’s seems that i may be bias, so dont believe anything i am writing.
See for your self and be mind-blowing impressed with the quality of their hardware documentation

Visit their facebook account for news and contact them if you have a brilliant idea about satellites or you just want to get a status of their work.

How about the team ?

I’ve met the entire team at Athens Hackerspace and the first thing that came into my mind (and it is most impressive) is the diversity of the members itself.

Not only in age (most of them are university students, but older hobbyists are participating too) but also in the technical area of expertise. This team can easily solve every practical problem they can find in the process.

SatNOGS, as I’ve already mentioned, is fully active and that all started (with the bing bang of-course) with an idea: To reach and communicate with the Space (the final frontier). Satellites are sending signals 24/7 and the ground stations cant reach every satellite (i am not talking to geo-static satellites) and there is no one to acknowledge that. The problem that the satnogs is solving is real.

And i hope with this blog post, more people can understand how important is that this project scale to more hackerspaces around the globe.

To see more, just click here and you can monitor the entire process till now.

Tons of information are passing through your eyes every day. People now are browsing than reading and there are some things you really want to store and read them when you have some free time. Bookmarks are pretty useful for storing the url but the actual content could be moved somewhere else or even removed from the original place.

read-it-later applications have worked their magic and offline (or caching) storing the actual content to another location. Some of these applications (or online services) have the ability to synchronize their content to your tablet/smartphone or even your ebook reader. The most known service is, of course, pocket.

But then again you have to register to another online service that uses your email for userid and now knows every single thing you like to read! And what will happen if the company behind this service decides to close this or change their policy to sell yours info or hacked or …. whatever …. ?

Well that’s the nice thing about free software!

You can self-hosting your own application for saving web pages (aka read-it-later) with wallabag

For this app you need to write the token so that you can synchronize your feeds to your phone.

Wallabag has many features - the most useful for me is the epub export. I can store my articles to my ebook reader !

How about security ? I dont care to setup wallabag under an SSL certificate or bother with “basic auth” login cause i store public articles !!! If someone obtains my credentials he/she/it can use wallabag to mesh with my articles (ok - i have backups) but he/she/it will not gain access to “private” information. That’s said - that dont mean that i dont value of the above (on the contrary) - is just a way to say that in my wallabag instance, i only store already public/publish web pages!

[Edit] UX - update - support - donate

I forgot to mention on my original post that i do appreciate 3 major things when using an free software project.

First is the UX, if something is toooooo difficult for me to use it, i’ll pass it. Even if it is the best project ever. Wallabag isnt top notch on UX, but the design isnt destructive at all when reading an offline article. The work that nicosomb have made on that is really nice.

Second thing the update process: If is too hard for me to update a project, soon i will be bored to do it. I am an intermediate linux user and an open source advocate but i am lazy. Too lazy. Wallabag is super easy to update. Just download and extract. I am amazed that this process isnt already inside wallabag config section. I hope to see that in the next release. But it’s really nice to be notified (internal checks when using config page) and do the hard work of opening a shell, login, download and extract the new release :P

Third thing in my forgot list is support. Wallabag is active and has a new support process. Something that not many opensource projects have. And Nicola (core developer) isnt a hard man to find on social media. That’s always something useful and handy for small things but a known fact that the developer is not MIA.

Finally i choose to support projects via donations. My donates are always smalls - cause i dont have (yet) millions to spare. But even a small contribution from many people can manage to pay for the VPS or other costs that the developer have to pay from his pocket.

Fairphone comes with an iFixit app - and of course with some other apps too ;)
If you want to remove it, you can simply connect your phone with your linux box, open USB debugging and adb shell through your phone

Fairphone is already rooted, so when you connect to it via adb, simply type:

su

to became root.

eg.

# adb shell
shell@android:/ $ su
shell@android:/ #

You can do what-ever you like - but be careful with it !

Next, remount your system partition to be read-write:

# mount -o rw,remount /system

and then simply remove the app you dont need:

# rm /system/app/FairPhoneIFixIt.apk

(you can alternative use an App-Remove application - but this is more fun, right ?)

I am a proud owner of a fairphone.
For about ~300 euros i bought a really cool smartphone.

When you boot up your phone for the first time, there is a widget to add support for google apps.
Just remove it and go on with your life. Nothing useful here.

[EDIT #1] Before we begin our beautiful opensource journey, you must have in mind that ALL your personal devices can be hacked, stolen or be destroyed (crashed/brick/whatever). You have to remember that - you should have your digital data elsewhere and sync/backup/encrypt EVERYTHING. So dont use your phone as an offline image gallery, dont save everything in our mails.

Be aware: THIS MUST BE the first thing, cause every data on your SD (internal/external) will be destroyed.

So you have to unlock the screen everytime with that PIN and it’s the same PIN that you need to type on boot time. Not very safe.

It’s safer to change the PIN to decrypt your card with a passphrase. There is an excellent article here or just use (without reading) this app: Cryptfs Password

I downloaded the app (through the f-droid site and not through f-droid app), i’ve changed the PIN to a PASSPHRASE and then removed the app from my phone.

AGAIN you must be sure that no data are in your SDCARD.

Verify that your phone is booting up fine, decryption is using the passphrase, there is an unlock PIN for you mobile card and a different PIN to unlock your screen lock.

It’s not paranoia (not yet) but it’s the most safe and easy thing you can do.

Below i will just document the apps i am using through F-Droid:

AdAway - Do remove ads

AFWall+ - Firewall App

Autostarts - Disable apps from starting at boot (or other state of your phone)

Barcode Scanner - QR decoder and more

DavDroid - CardDAV/CalDAV client

DiskUsage - Disk Usage

Epub3 Reader - Cause i read epub books

F-droid - Free software for your android

Firefox - Web Browser

k9 - email client

OpenFlashLight - a simple flash light

OsmAnd~ - Openstreet Navigator (and more)

RMaps - Map Client (and more)

Ted - simple text editor

Terminal Emulator - cause let’s face it, if you have a shell access you can do everything.

Tincd-vpn - Vpn client

VuDroid - Pdf Reader

Wallabag - offline read later app

Xabber - Jabber client

There are two closed source apps that i am using and couldnt find a decent replacement on f-droid (and believe me when i am telling you that i’ve tried a few).

MyBookDroid - book cataloging

Tweedle - twitter client

MyBookDroid is nowhere to find - I’ve moved it from my previous phone

[EDIT 2]: I’ve installed Twidere and used it for a while - but i didnt like it.

I will document the use of DavDroid to another blog post - cause you need a free software card/cal DAV server to use it.
DavDroid will give you the ability to synchronize your contacts against your own server.

K-9 has the ability to add PGP support - to encrypt your emails when talking to a recipient with PGP.
I will also document k-9 with my mail server setup.